La Biblioteca del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Esperanza López Parada, Marta Ortiz and Paul Firbas, editors. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional y Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID), 2016. 239 pp.
La biblioteca del Inca is an illustrated book-catalog that accompanied the exhibit we curated at the National Library of Spain in 2016, which attempted to reproduce the personal library of Peruvian mestizo writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Cuzco, 1539- Córdoba, Spain, 1616), on the occasion of the 400 years of his death. The exhibit and book-catalog reconstruct the documented readings and universe of ideas of one of the most important historians and humanists of the new transatlantic Hispanic culture, author of La Florida del Inca (1605), Comentarios reales (1609) and Historia general del Perú (1616-1617).
The book contains an introductory text by the editors, “The library of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega” (19-32) and four commissioned essays: Carmen Bernard, “Humanism and the Memory of the Incas” (33-48); Pedro Guibovich, “The textual circulation of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in the Andes” (49-62); José Antonio Mazzotti, “Problems on the First Age: Notes on Andean Knowledge in the Royal Commentaries” and José Antonio Rodríguez Garrido, “Inca Garcilaso’s Last Book” (75-87). In pages 93-179 the editors comment on thirty selected pieces of the exhibit, which gathered more than one-hundred books and objects. The volume also contains an excellent facsimile reproduction and a new transcription of Inca Garcilaso’s Inventario de bienes (Archivo de Protocolos de Córdoba), made by paleographer Rosario Navarro Gala (183-195). Finally, the book provides a chronology of the Inca’s life and the full list of the items included in the exhibit held in Madrid in 2016.
Information from National Library of Spain: BNE webpage and video.
Newspaper article in El Comercio (Lima) by Paul Firbas
City map of Cuzco, 1643 (Archivo Arzobispal de Lima). Trifold map included in the book La biblioteca del Inca. Photograph by Luis E. Tello Vidal.
One of the many cases displaying the book titles registered in Inca Garcilaso’s codicil of 1616.